Positive News: First “Functional Cure” for HIV

There is a cure for HIV. There is a cure for cancer. There is a cure for MS and Parkinson’s. There is a cure for every virus and disease… we just need to find them. Thinking positively that cures actually exist to be found is the first step. The second is thinking positively that we, humanity, will find them is the second. It is only a matter of how long it will take.

30 years to the week after the discovery of HIV some very positive news has been reported from the Associated Press by Yahoo News. First man ‘functionally cured’ of HIV…. 33.3 million people around the world live with HIV and it spreads to 7,000 people per day… this functionally cured man is the best news since the 1990’s when anti-retroviral drugs were introduced, which made the illness more manageable.

The technique used to help this one man, Timothy Ray Brown, is not very practical for a world wide cure. Mr. Brown had both HIV and Leukemia. In 2007 he received a bone marrow transplant from a man who is immune to HIV. It is believed that roughly 1% of the Caucasian population is immune to HIV. This is potentially a result of traits passed down from ancestors that developed an immunity to the plague centuries ago.

Mr. Brown’s doctor, Dr. Gero Huetter said to Reuters: “He has no replicating virus and he isn’t taking any medication. And he will now probably never have any problems with HIV”.

The new challenge is finding a way to recreate these results without having to accomplish them through a bone marrow transplant from this sliver of the population. There is something within the bone marrow transplant that holds the secret to a true cure. We will find it. We will overcome this virus and it will go the way of Polio; a historically devastating disease that is virtually eliminated from the Western hemisphere.

1 Comment

I will clear this up for everyone. This 1% issue, first of all is a theory. And it is 1% of people in the world. The theory is based off of people several 100 years ago who developed immunity to smallpox, but this has been happening all over the world for millions of years whenever there is a plague. A small amount of people survive. There is another theory that states that humans will evolve. therefore 1% of the human population more than likely have immunity to HIV or we could all become extinct. Since this has never happened in the history of mankind this THEORY proves true, but there is not a real way of proving it. Now that we have this case this theory proves to be even stronger. Where yahoo messed up in this article is by stating it was 1% of Caucasians that have immunity. Instead they should have done some good journalism and researched the facts about this theory and all that it states. Then they would have written something like this, “Based on scientific research, it is possible that 1% of people are immune to HIV.” What I find really funny is i posted an wrote to Yahoo about this error when this article came out because I knew it would cause so much confusion and when people started to do research about they would become more confused because they segregated the immunity to